phone

Mobile phone users in the US can now breathe another sigh of relief. Soon, it will no longer be a criminal act to have your device unlocked long after your contract with your carrier expired. Following the lead of the Senate, the House unanimously approved the " Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act", which is now just waiting for the President to sign into law.

Though the vote of 3-2 knocks out a technical ban in the FCC, the rule against using cellphones to make calls in-flight is still being left up to the Department of Transportation to make a final ruling on here near the end of 2013. This week's vote was a close one. The FCC's meeting today had FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler taking special care to note that this vote does not instantly grant travelers the right to make a phone call on their next flight - there's still voting to be done before that's all well and good.

Cisco has announced a new desk phone for your office that takes a standard videoconferencing capable phone for the office and crams Android goodness inside. The phone is called the DX650 and it leverages Android for business needs such as videoconferencing. The DX650 has a built-in webcam supporting full HD resolution video calls at 30 frames per second.

Introducing the Nokia 515 this week, the company has suggested that there's not only room for more feature phones in our immediate future, but there's room for premium features - and the internet - on them as well. This device works with a "classic mobile phone" style and a set of premium materials - like an aluminum frame - along with a back-facing 5-megapixel camera to command high-quality photos the likes of which have never before been seen from a phone in this market. And it comes in black or silver, too.

You might remember that dual-booting Linux and Android-powered phone that we discussed last month. It's called the Ubuntu Edge and it's hoping to change the mobile landscape in a big way. However, before it can do that, Canonical needs some funding help in order to produce the phone for the masses, and it seems like pledges are slowing down, for which Canonical is bumping the price down in order to get more people interested.

Though some of us have elected to make our smartphones our main phones, many still have a home phone line, and for those users, Panasonic has developed a cordless offering that brings Android to the landline. The KX-PRX120 looks like a slightly dated, thick smartphone, but functions as a standard cordless home phone, providing a touchscreen display and front-facing camera, among other features.

AT&T has added to its in-home wireless offerings with new Wireless Home Phone and Internet plans that utilize the carrier's LTE and HSPA networks. For now the service is only being offered in the eastern United States, but could eventually be rolled out to subscribers across the nation. Furthermore, it can be tacked on to an existing Mobile Share plan.

Almost every phone in existence uses a SIM card, especially GSM-based devices. It turns out, that while SIM cards are encrypted, they can easily be breached with just a couple of text messages, and it apparently takes only a couple of minutes. The hack allows someone to listen in on calls and steal mobile data from a phone.

The US Patent and Trademark Office has granted Apple a patent that would allow a phone to automatically and intelligently select the best method to contact someone given the current situation. In order to determine what the best communication method would be, the phone would use its GPS, microphone, accelerometer, etc. to determine the best course of action.

Nokia has a new QWERTY phone today, and as we suspected it slots into the company's cheaper Asha line, rather than being the keyboard-equipped Lumia many have been hoping for. The Asha 210 packs full-QWERTY into a candybar form-factor, but also includes a dedicated WhatsApp shortcut key, with free lifetime service on the cross-platform messaging app for anyone who buys the single- or dual-SIM versions of the phone.